What is the meaning of git reset --hard origin/master?

Question

I did a git pull and got an error:

The following working tree files would be overwritten by merge... Please move or remove them before you

Answer 1

In newer version of git (2.23+) you can use:

git switch -C master origin/master

-C is same as --force-create. Related Reference Docs

Answer 2

git reset --hard origin/master

says: throw away all my staged and unstaged changes, forget everything on my current local branch and make it exactly the same as origin/master.

You probably wanted to ask this before you ran the command. The destructive nature is hinted at by using the same words as in "hard reset".